(JTA) — Massachusetts incumbent and Israel critic Sen. Ed Markey, 80, is expected to handily fend off the more moderate 47-year-old Rep. Seth Moulton on Tuesday, in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.

Although polls project that Markey, a progressive stalwart, will retain his seat, this race began as a neck-and-neck battle between the old and new guard. Yet in contrast to many recent primaries, the junior candidate in this case is the more centrist of the two.

If current numbers hold, Markey could go from leading Moulton by just single digits two months ago, to trouncing him by 30 percentage points. The incumbent recently “opened a large lead,” with the University of New Hampshire’s Bay State Poll projecting a 63% to 28% victory. That’s a dramatic shift from June, when the survey estimated a 41% to 35% margin. Since then, according to Bay State, Moulton lost moderate support while Markey consolidated socialist and progressive backing.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst offered similar predictions, placing Markey far ahead of his competitor, 60% to 32%. Emerson College Polling, meanwhile, showed a comparable lead for Markey, with the incumbent at 60% and Moulton at 33%.

“At the end of the day, one of the reasons for Moulton’s flame-out is that he had no case to make other than ‘I’m younger than Ed Markey,’” Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Senate investigative counsel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

“He wasn’t able to obscure that very well,” added Robbins, who also served as delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission under President Bill Clinton. He also began organizing rallies in support of Israel in 2012, during his time serving as chairman of the New England Board of the Anti-Defamation League.

Markey began serving in the U.S. House of Representatives 50 years ago, staying in that role until he was elected to the Senate in 2013. During his time in the House, he was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and in the Senate, he has voted for multiple resolutions aimed at cutting military aid and munitions sales to Israel.

Moulton, meanwhile, was born two years after Markey arrived on Capitol Hill. He has been serving in the U.S. House since 2015 and has been critical of both the Democratic socialist agenda and the aging establishment, instead calling for “new energy, new ideas and leaders willing to put people over politics.”

He established the Serve America PAC in 2017 to support the campaigns of “military veterans, other service-driven candidates and next generation leaders” in the 2020 election cycle. The Boston Globe recently threw its support behind Moulton, calling for  “new vision and vigor” in “an aging, ailing and deeply unpopular Democratic Party.”

Yet a recent New York Times piece described Moulton as a “rebel without a cause,” who has “tried to drift where he thinks the political winds are blowing.” One such drift relates to his breakup with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last October, when he announced that he would be “returning AIPAC donations and refusing to accept any donations or support from them.”

“In recent years AIPAC has aligned itself too closely with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government,” Moulton said. “I’m a friend of Israel, but not of its current government.”

Track AIPAC, a group that documents political spending by pro-Israel lobbies, declared in response that “returning AIPAC’s blood money is better late than never.” The group demanded that Moulton call the war in Gaza a genocide and “stop writing blank checks” to Israel’s “tyrannical regime.”

Citing Federal Election Commission records, Track AIPAC found that pro-Israel PACs have spent about $101,500 on Moulton over his career — a relatively modest amount for a six-term congressman..

“It is clearly the safe thing to do, if you are running for a nomination in the Democratic Party, to aggressively distance yourself from Israel,” said Robbins.

He described the situation as “reflective of the reality that we have seen play out in spades over the last year,” in which Democratic candidates are “running for the hills about AIPAC and treating it as a boogeyman.”

Not only was Moulton’s decision insufficient to recruit AIPAC detractors to his campaign, but it also rattled many members of the Jewish community.

Political scientist Samuel Abrams at the time described the decision as “the moment when an ambitious, mainstream Democrat concluded that distancing himself from the organized Jewish community is a political asset, not a liability.”

“In today’s Democratic ecosystem, the act of rejecting traditional Jewish institutions has become a badge of progressive credibility,” wrote Abrams, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right public policy think tank.

David Frum, a writer for The Atlantic and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, suggested that Moulton was “opening the door *just a little* to anti-Jewish feeling,” In other words, Moulton would seek to win his primary by borrowing some “Mamdani energy,” Frum added, referring to the popular progressive mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani.

“If you want to have a prayer of being elected in a Democratic primary in this country, you had better be able to say, ‘I don’t take money from AIPAC. In fact, I never heard of it before,’” Robbins said.

But he stressed Moulton’s 30-point lag in the polls has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with his opponent’s political shrewdness and refusal to allow anyone “to run to the left of him.”

Markey is not new to staving off a younger, center-left candidate. In 2020, at 74, he defeated the then-39-year-old Rep. Joe Kennedy III — marking the first loss for a Kennedy in a Massachusetts election, according to the Cook Political Report.

If the current polls prove accurate, Tuesday’s race could “mirror Markey’s successful ‘peak-late’ approach to winning in 2020,” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said in a statement. “Younger voters appear more likely than older voters to support Markey, suggesting the campaign did not create the generational divide Moulton may have anticipated.”

As for Moulton’s relationship toward American Jews, he has historically denounced hate crimes and voted for resolutions on antisemitism. He also condemned Claudine Gay, former president of his alma mater, Harvard University, when she refused to say that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the institution’s code of conduct.

Prior to his rejection of AIPAC money, Moulton’s stance on Israel was fairly balanced, with consistent messages on Israel’s right to defend itself, alongside criticisms of the country’s military operations in Gaza and calls for expansions of humanitarian aid.

Moulton’s objections have paled in comparison to Markey’s stance, which has ranged from demanding an end to arms sales to accusing the country of committing war crimes.

Markey did condemn Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel as terrorism, continuing to deplore the “dark day” as “heinous” in a statement two years later. But in that same statement, he also stressed that “more than 65,000 Palestinians have lost their lives in the brutality of the war in Gaza” and called “to stop the bloodshed.”

However, the senator didn’t always disapprove of Israel.

“For a long time he was right there with the Jewish community,” Barry Shrage, a professor of practice at Brandeis University and the longtime former president of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, told JTA.

In fact, Shrage and Robbins recalled in a recent Boston Herald column that during a November 2012 Hamas-Israel conflict, Markey asked them to help him organize a pro-Israel rally. The event, they wrote, was “full of appreciation for the fundamental fact that Israel is surrounded by non-state and state actors committed to annihilating it.”

But less than two years later, the tides had turned. After winning a 2013 special election to serve out the remainder of John Kerry’s Senate term, Markey then faced a general election in 2014 for a full Senate term. That summer, Hamas rockets rained down on Israel again, and the military responded to the attacks, as it did in November 2012.

Robbins said that when he and his colleagues decided to organize another rally in support of Israel at the time, he reached out to Markey.

“He ducks. He dodges. He doesn’t return the phone calls. He doesn’t return the emails,” Robbins recalled. “He had calculated correctly that it was not in his interest to have anything to do with Israel anymore.”

Shrage echoed these sentiments, observing that “it turned out to be at least from a political standpoint, if not from a moral standpoint, the right path.”

“It’s not a surprise that Markey is separating himself from Israel in every way that he can,” he added.

Looking toward the future, Shrage said that he had some hope for a turnaround on Israel in the Democratic party if, perhaps, a recent progressive primary winner lost against a Republican in the general election. Some possible examples could include Senate candidates Angie Nixon in Florida or Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

While Robbins agreed that a loss for El-Sayed could give a slight bump to Democratic supporters of Israel, he was pessimistic about the long-term ability to reverse the party’s increasing hostility toward the Jewish state.

“The only conceivable trigger for a walking back of this trend would be some massacre of Israelis so terrible that even the left would have to concede that Israel had the right to do what it did,” Robbins said.

“The problem with that is, it’s already occurred,” he added.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Massachusetts progressive Markey, a longtime Israel critic, expected to rout centrist challenger appeared first on The Forward.

Billboards have been popping up around New York City, with a simple, if cryptic, message: Jews.com. There are several across from the Barclay’s Center in downtown Brooklyn. There’s one on the Upper East Side. Another looms over a highway.

If you visit the site, however, you won’t find information about Judaism, at least not as Jews understand it. Instead, you’ll find videos of a man named Kirt Schneider. And he’s talking about Jesus.

Schneider is a Messianic Jewish self-proclaimed rabbi — though, when we spoke on the phone about the billboard campaign, he did note that he had not been ordained, nor had he gone to yeshiva. “I realize the Orthodox community wouldn’t understand me as a rabbi,” he said.

Schneider’s mission with the site and billboard campaign — which he said was inspired by a vision he had while sleeping — is to introduce Jews to “to simply look at the evidence” that Jesus is the Jewish messiah, he said.

Most of Schneider’s sermons and writings on Jews.com talk about prophecies throughout the Hebrew Bible that he — along with most Christians — believe prove that Jesus is the messiah. Jesus, Schneider pointed out, was a Jew as were his early followers; he said this means there is no conflict between being a Jew and a Christian.

“What I’m wanting to do is shed the veil and the misinformation over the Jewish people that’s been placed upon them by almost 2,000 years of rabbinic tradition and to help them see through at least some of that,” Schneider told me. “I love my rabbis, but I think there’s been a coverup in the sense that rabbis have tried to prevent the Jewish people from taking a serious look at Jesus. I believe that Jesus is the Jewish messiah.”

But, of course, for centuries now, one of the main differences between Judaism and Christianity — arguably the defining difference — is that Jews do not believe that Jesus is the messiah, and Christians do. And that difference of opinion has driven centuries of antisemitic persecution of Jews, who Christians have accused of killing Jesus, going against God and taking part in a demonic cult by continuing to practice Judaism. Jews, for their part, often see proselytizing as disrespectful and harmful; every Jewish denomination as well as many major groups reject Messianic Judaism as a form of Judaism, and most scholars consider it a form of Protestant Christianity.

A vision of billboards

This is not the first time Schneider has attempted to bring Jews to Jesus; he runs a TV show on Christian cable networks called Discovering the Jewish Jesus, and has radio shows on the same topic — success that has made him a millionaire, thanks in part to donations from believers. He even blessed Donald Trump as part of a group of evangelical pastors and televangelists.

This is not even Schneider’s first billboard campaign targeting Jews; he ran billboards in Times Square in 2019 advertising a different website, theJewishJesus.com, also attempting to bring Jews to Jesus. (Schneider would not answer how he paid for these expensive billboard placements beyond saying that he had been “very successful” in his career.)

Schneider was raised as a secular Jew, and was bar mitzvahed at a Conservative synagogue in Cleveland, Ohio. However, in his early adult years, while working as an encyclopedia salesman — in a story he has written about online and repeated almost verbatim to me over the phone — he had a vision of Jesus on the cross while asleep, or, as he put it, in a “supernatural state of conscious awareness.”

From then on, despite the best efforts of his family, he became a follower of Jesus.. (The billboard campaign, he told me, was also the result of a vision.) Schneider just does not consider following Jesus to make him any less Jewish, because Judaism, to him, is purely carried by blood, not belief.

“A Jew is someone who is born a physical descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. You can be a Jew and be an atheist and still be considered a Jew, you can be agnostic and still be considered a Jew,” he said. “The only Jews that aren’t considered Jews are the Jews who believe in Jesus,” something he said was “very sad.”

This is why Schneider said he does not refer to himself as a Christian; the term, he said, comes from the Greek word for messiah. He wants to emphasize his belief that Jesus is specifically the Jewish messiah through avoiding Greek in favor of Hebrew terms like “moshiach.”

“A Christian is someone who is not born a Christian, technically, a Christian is someone who makes the decision to follow the Christ. I am a Jew, and I believe in the Jewish messiah,” he said. “And if you want to use the Greek, then I’m a Christian.”

Schneider’s sermons and writings on jews.com are similarly peppered with small bits of Hebrew: He refers to God as “Hashem” and Jesus as “Yeshua,” the Hebrew form of the name, both of which are common practices in groups Messianic Jewish groups including Jews for Jesus. In some videos — though not those on jews.com — he sports peyot (sans kippah) and a tallis, as though he is Hasidic, all choices he makes, he said, as a way to “incorporate his Jewish identity” into his discussions of Jesus.

But aside from those aesthetic markers, Schneider makes little mention in the videos on the site of the usual Jewish practices, like keeping kosher or observing Shabbat, and instead focuses on Jesus. And though he may prefer not to call himself a Christian, he did attend a Christian Bible college where he met his wife and even preached in “mainline” Protestant Christian churches in 1985, before becoming a salesman for several decades. He founded his current ministry, Discovering the Jewish Jesus, in 2002.

Bringing ‘Messiah Yeshua’ to Jews

Messianic Jewish organizations have long sought to convert Jews to Christianity, and have incorporated markers of observant Judaism as a strategy to attract Jews to the fold — one of the reasons various Jewish organizations have sometimes labeled Messianic Judaism a form of antisemitism and fraud, arguing that by representing themselves as Jews, they confuse people into attending their services or believing they speak on behalf of the larger Jewish community.

Schneider is taking a page out of the proselytizing playbook beyond his aesthetic and linguistic choices; his jews.com billboards are placed in the New York City area. And outside of Tel Aviv, he has a Hebrew language campaign with billboards asking passersby, in Hebrew, “What if he was right?” There’s a matching website for that campaign, too, also in Hebrew.

On the main website of his ministry — where monthly donors are promised a shofar made in Israel — there is a page about “Jewish outreach” that states “God has placed a specific burden on Rabbi Schneider to lovingly, directly, and faithfully bring the truth of Messiah Yeshua to Jewish people,” and create a “spiritual harvest among Jewish people.” The billboards concentrated in the heavily Jewish areas of Tel Aviv and New York City, are Schneider’s attempts to do just that.

“This thing is going to blow up,” he said of his attempts to bring Jews to Jesus, “and nothing’s going to be able to stop it.”

The post ‘Jews.com’ is posted on billboards across NYC — meet the Messianic Jewish preacher putting them up appeared first on The Forward.

The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living
By Dara Horn
Simon & Schuster, 384 pages, $30

A few days after I started reading Dara Horn’s new book, I was called a “kike” for the first time to my face.

It was a sunny afternoon and I was wearing my Newsguild shirt. A person on the sidewalk, deshabille, possibly collecting junk, asked what union I was in. Against my better judgment I engaged, believing them to be a fellow worker. I said I was a journalist. They then decided I was a “fascist” and “complicit.”

“Do you like writing about the genocide in Palestine? The war in Iran?” they asked me, trailing me past a Judaica story in a very Jewish neighborhood. They told me they had written their honors thesis on Nazi Germany and how Goebbels seized the news media. An easy A, they assured me, that had echoes of today.

Because they seemed so fluent in the wrongs of the Third Reich, I wasn’t expecting what was said next. I was anticipating their accusation that I am insulated, white and rich and so therefore unaffected by whatever is going on in the Trump administration (which of course is famously kind to members of the press). I wasn’t prepared to be called a “fucking Jew,” or for this person to then insist they weren’t antisemitic and in the next breath utter the k-word.

I can’t speak to the mental state of this person. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were unhoused. I don’t consider them any kind of ambassador for the pro-Palestine movement. But, based on the way they spoke and a reference to their college commencement speaker — a famous journalist who they proudly said they withheld applause for — I can only assume they were educated.

Horn’s The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, her latest provocatively-titled nonfiction book is a survey of antisemitism past and present and the ways Jews explain ourselves to the world. At its heart, it is about education.

It begins with Horn discussing her reluctant role as educator and confidante to her troubled landsmen after the publication of her 2021 bestseller People Love Dead Jews. She became what her sister termed the “antisemitism Lorax,” alone on her stump denouncing a great evil, and feeling feckless. But from that unofficial position, Horn received an actual appointment: She was tapped in the wake of Oct. 7, for an antisemitism advisory group at her alma mater, Harvard.

The climate of today’s academy makes Horn uncomfortable. Gone are the problem-solving Ivy Leaguers of her younger days — both in the student body and the administration. (In a chapter called “Cowardice at Harvard, she diagnoses a disengagement with challenging ideas.) The dogma de jour is anti-Zionism, which she fashions without the hyphen, claiming that it, like antisemitism, is “an ideology unrelated to anything real about Jews.”

Harvard and its protests, now the stuff of high-profile federal lawsuits, are not a free speech issue, she insists, but a failure in pedagogy.

Her concerns have merit, and are backed up by anecdotal evidence she had access to as a committee member and later as a speaker at a Jewish alumni event, where she was escorted through Harvard Yard by an armed guard. But she can’t help sensationalizing the atmosphere on campus. The protest movement’s slogans are likened to Nazi Germany or Hamas. (She writes, twice, of the argument that “‘intifada’ just means ‘uprising,’” in the same way that “‘Sieg heil’ just means ‘hail victory,’” and compares the usage of “Free Palestine” to “a kind of greeting and farewell to signal cult membership, the way people once used ‘Heil Hitler.’” )

She’s at her most engaging in another chapter, where she makes a robust argument for an intellectual lineage connecting Nazi propaganda to Soviet emanations of antisemitism and contemporary Islamist movements. Her explanation flows through a Nazi named Johann von Leers, who might be called both the father and the Forrest Gump of anti-Zionism.

Von Leers worked with Goebbels, absconded via a ratline to Argentina after the war where he took a job at the Egyptian embassy during the tenure of president Gamel Abdel Nasser, produced anti-Zionist tracts that were later reprinted in Russia and died at a ripe old age after converting to Islam with the encouragement of the Nazi-allied Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. If these disparate ideologies have the same playbook for vilifying Zionists, she reasons, it’s because he wrote it.

This history is enlightening, if familiar to a follower of pro-Israel academics on X. But in claiming it as a skeleton key that unlocks the conspiracy behind the conspiracy of anti-Zionism, she flattens a movement she faults for flattening Zionism. She mostly appears to know she’s committing the same sin of simplification. It still made me wince.

In the same way she asserts that “Zionist” is really a euphemism for Jews, she simply refers to Hamas militants as “antizionists,” implying an equivalence between a designated terror group and someone like, I don’t know, Naomi Klein. The children in Gaza who danced in the ghoulish procession of the Bibas family caskets are also “antizionists,” children who she insists, excessively, were “well-fed.”

Horn’s fix for indoctrination is a new kind of lesson plan. I’ll save you the suspense: This is a very readable, often furious 384-page brochure for her new initiative, The Tell Institute, a curriculum on Jewish civilization. In her listening sessions with Jewish educators desperate to bring a primer on Jewish life to districts without Jewish people, she writes how she sees more curiosity than hostility.

This stands in contrast to some of the more frantic episodes she spends the book illustrating: the rash of antisemitic attacks from the streets of Boulder to the beaches of Bondi; the data-poisoning of the internet to influence AI models; the Qatar-backed Jew-hate campaign that she says is duping kids on quads into thinking Israel is a settler-colony; celebrities on red carpets wearing ceasefire buttons that she claims bear “the same red handprint” that demarcated Jewish businesses during the Farhud (I’d heard another antisemitic explanation for that choice of symbol, but sure).

Her proposal is that we use some of the history she outlines in the book to overhaul how we teach the world about Jews. This requires breaking down the midcentury “Gentleman’s Agreement” (named for the film and book) that collapsed Jewish identity into a religion to better suit the gentile gaze. It will teach how antisemitism is the Big Lie that Jews are the enemy of whatever a society values in any given moment. And, it will teach a kind of Jewish exceptionalism.

Horn argues that it was a mistake for the organized Jewish community to vie for acceptance by presenting Jews as like everyone else when “Jews have spent the past three thousand years not being like everyone else.” It was on the grounds of this difference that Jews were so often murdered, but Horn reasons that teaching why Jewish life developed as it did, and why it prompted such hate, will help deprogram some of the pupils of a Nazi-Soviet-Islamist plot to shape public opinion. (Whether this will dissipate their concern for Palestinians, perhaps premised more on a flood of horrific videos from the Gaza Strip or the occupied West Bank than any long-running scheme to smear Israel, goes unanswered.)

She’s heard the objections to her presentation of Jews as extraordinary.

“It was apparently in poor taste to point out the basic fact that Jews were the world’s first monotheists,” she writes. (This claim is debatable for fans of the pharaoh Akhenaten and his cult of Aten; scholars have diverse views about the dating and monotheistic character of Zoroastrianism.)

“[O]r,” she goes on, “that Jews had invested thousands of years in the idea and practice of legal debate.” (Got it, Jews are legalistic — never heard that one before.)

Or “[t]he commitments that Jews worldwide have made to help other Jews in peril.” (Regarding the particularism of Jewish largesse — itself a canard — Horn insists “you aren’t a chauvinist for giving more support” to one of your own.)

The issue — and this is a running problem with the book’s slighter focus on rightwing bigotry — is that this framing of Jewish history is already well-known among circles that don’t exactly have the warm-fuzzies for us.

“We have to emulate the Jews,” opined one admirer named Nick Fuentes. “The way they stick together, the way they help each other, the way they focus on what matters — they’re learned.”

“Noticers,” the self-assigned moniker for those who sound the alarm against “Jewish supremacy,” need not be informed of our contributions — they know and despise them as Horn’s Nazi mastermind Johann von Leers did.

What they detest, Horn says, is that Jewish civilization, maintained through a series of countercultural decisions like emphasizing literacy and following God’s law instead of one dictated by despots, is an “anti-tyrannical movement” that shaped the world. This story demands to be taught because “it shows that freedom and pluralism are possible.” But how does one tailor the teaching to a group that may have already decided Jews (or Israel) are tyrannical — unanswerable to international law and trampling the freedom of others —  because a TikTok algorithm, podcaster or Twitch streamer told them?

Students already seem to resent, or at least question, the amount of mandated time schools spend on the Holocaust versus other atrocities (the book republishes much of Horn’s insightful 2023 Atlantic piece on Holocaust education). So how are they likely to feel if their school ups the content concerning 0.2% of the population by revisiting a watershed moment like the “Zionism is racism” conclusion of a 2001 UN conference in Durban, South Africa? It feels more than niche — it comes off as agenda-driven, because it is.

Horn herself is unsure this experiment will work, but she’s right to say it’s better than doing nothing or continuing on a course that’s clearly not equal to the challenge. At the very least, she thinks Jews should take pride in their own accomplishments, and is pitching her curriculum to synagogues as well.

We are dealing with an intractable problem of a shapeshifting hate that always forces us to prove a negative, whether it about eating babies or control of global finance. I can’t dismiss antisemitism as simply overblown when an example — by no means representative, but an example nonetheless — spat invective in my direction.

But that person who stalked me down the street and called me a kike may have known about Johann von Leers; they did say, after all, that they wrote their thesis on the Nazi takeover of the press. Their education didn’t inoculate them to prejudice, it gave them a parallel to throw in my Jewish face.

The issue may not be ignorance, but a dangerously wrong reading of history.

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